Asian World Film Festival

The Asian World Film Festival is a film festival based in Los Angeles, California. In its first year it ran from October 26 to November 2, 2015, and will continue for 5 years. The Festival is an initiative by Kyrgyz public figure and filmmaker, Sadyk Sher-Niyaz.

Founding

Sher-Niyaz founded the Festival in late 2014, after his own experience in running a campaign for the Best Foreign Language Film category at the Academy Awards. Sher-Niyaz was the director of the Kyrgyz submission, Kurmanjan Datka: Queen of the Mountains, which according to the Hollywood Reporter was predicted one of the top 15 contenders.

According to The Wrap Sher-Niyaz created the Festival to help other Asian filmmakers in their Oscar campaigns.

″I created the Asian World Film Festival to fill a void that I noticed was missing in America. There is a wealth of underrated filmmakers from our region that deserve recognition and this festival was designed to champion and promote them,″ festival chairman and creator Sadyk Sher-Niyaz said.

Mission

According to the Festival website, the Asian World Film Festival, "brings the best of a broad selection of Asian World cinema to Los Angeles in order to draw greater recognition to the region's wealth of filmmakers, strengthening ties between the Asian and Hollywood film industries. Uniting through cross-cultural collaboration, our festival champions films from 50 countries across Asia spanning from Turkey to Japan and Russia to India."